We recently ended our week-long investigation into How We Reproduce--or, as it turns out, how we don't. In addition to covering a few forms of contraception in our fertility and pregnancy gear roundup, we also took a look at advances in male contraception and gleefully childfree forums. The good news is that if you're not spending money on baby bottles and strollers, then you have plenty left in your pocket for Dell's March Madness sale. If you've been looking for an affordable smart speaker, Amazon's Echo and Fire Tablet sale ends today. We also have a few other great bargains on some of our favorite action camera, smart TVs, and more.

Tablets often go unused, and when you do want to play with it, it's probably dead because you forgot to charge it. At least, that's what happens to me. Lenovo, however, has come up with a potential solution to the neglected tablet dilemma: the Smart Tab. It was a finalist for Best of CES this year in the smart home category, and here's why: You can place it inside a companion Bluetooth speaker dock, at which point it becomes an Alexa-powered smart display similar to Amazon's Echo Show. This way, when the Smart Tab is not being used as a tablet, it still has a purpose as a smart display.

The slow death of Wunderlist continues. Beginning April 15, Microsoft will disconnect Cortana and Wunderlist, so that you won't be able to issue oral reminders via Cortana any more. As of January, Cortana integrates with Microsoft To-Do, though you'll need to be running a Windows Insider version of the Windows 10 April 2019 Update and follow some convoluted setup instructions to enable it. In the meantime, though, Microsoft is obliquely notifying customers that Wunderlist is being de-prioritized. That's because you'll have to click on the Cortana/search field, navigate to the Notebook, then to Connected Services, and finally to the Wunderlist button.

Amazon's Alexa needs its own robotic body to reach its full potential, creators of the smart assistant say. It may mean future versions of the popular gadget are able to follow their owners around the house and listen to conversations with greater ease. Rohit Prasad, head scientist at Amazon's Alexa division, claims the only way to rid the AI-assistant of its shackles is to'give it eyes and let it explore the world'. He said this would be the only way for the devices to better understand the ambiguity and complexity of human language. Rohit Prasad, head scientists at Amazon's Alexa division, claims the only way to rid the AI-assistant of its shackles is to give it'eyes to explore the world'.

"Alexa, what's the weather going to be like today." It's taken decades for scientists to understand natural human speech to the point where voice-activated interfaces such as Alexa, the natural language processing system by Amazon, are sufficiently enabled to be successfully accepted by consumers. Alexa is who talks to users of Amazon's Echo products including the Echo, Dot and Tap, as well as Amazon Fire TV and other third-party products. Even since 2012, when the patent was filed for what would ultimately become Amazon's artificial intelligence system Alexa, there has been tremendous growth in capabilities and the credit for that growth goes to machine learning. For something that we do every day without giving it any thought, conversation between machines and humans is complex.

You're cool chatting up Amazon Alexa, the Google Assistant and Siri and having each come alive when you utter the "Alexa," "Hey, Google" or "Hey, Siri" wake words. But your kids are also engaging with the popular digital voices inside the smart speakers in your home and your big concern has mostly to do with privacy. Amazon and Google really cornered the smart speaker market. That's the chief takeaway from a new study, exclusive to USA TODAY and conducted in February, by Common Sense Media and SurveyMonkey Audience. Robocall crackdown: FTC continues robocall crackdown, stops groups responsible for'billions' of calls More than 4 in 10 of the 1,127 parents of children ages 2 to 8 who participated in the survey say their family uses a smart speaker such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home.

Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Limited is seeking to sell Grindr, the popular gay dating app it has owned since 2016, after a US government national security panel raised concerns about its ownership, according to people familiar with the matter. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has informed Kunlun that its ownership of West Hollywood, California-based Grindr constitutes a national security risk, the two sources told Reuters. CFIUS's specific concerns and whether any attempt was made to mitigate them could not be learned. The United States has been increasingly scrutinizing application developers over the safety of personal data they handle, especially if some of it involves US military or intelligence personnel. Kunlun had said last August it was preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) of Grindr.

The US government says a Chinese gaming company's ownership of the gay dating app Grindr poses a national security risk, according to a report from Reuters. Beijing Kunlun Tech acquired a 60 percent stake in Grindr in 2016 and bought the rest in 2018. But, Reuters reports, the Chinese firm didn't clear the acquisition with the agency known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which evaluates the national security impacts of foreign investments in US companies. Kunlun is now seeking to sell Grindr following the CFIUS assessment, according to Reuters. Grindr declined to comment; CFIUS and Kunlun did not respond to requests for comment.

Video: Getting started with artificial intelligence and machine learning It depends who you ask. Back in the 1950s, the fathers of the field Minsky andMcCarthy, described artificial intelligence as any task performed by a program or a machine that, if a human carried out the same activity, we would say the human had to apply intelligence to accomplish the task. That obviously is a fairly broad definition, which is why you will sometimes see arguments over whether something is truly AI or not. AI systems will typically demonstrate at least some of the following behaviors associated with human intelligence: planning, learning, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge representation, perception, motion, and manipulation and, to a lesser extent, social intelligence and creativity. AI is ubiquitous today, used to recommend what you should buy next online, to recognise what you say to virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, to recognise who and what is in a photo, to spot spam, or detect credit card fraud. At a very high level artificial intelligence can be split into two broad types: narrow AI and general AI. Narrow AI is what we see all around us in computers today: intelligent systems that have been taught or learned how to carry out specific tasks without being explicitly programmed how to do so.

Samsung SmartThings has been the leading product in the smart hub space pretty much since the day it was released, but one small problem has long held it back: It had to be tethered to your router with an ethernet cable. For many users, including myself, that one problem was a deal breaker. There are just two available ethernet ports on my router, and I'm just not interested in turning my living room into a server closet with switches and cables running all over the place. With the third-generation SmartThings Hub (Samsung model number GP-U999SJVLGDA), Samsung finally enters the wireless age in earnest. It still provides the option to connect the hub to your router via ethernet, but Wi-Fi connectivity is the default.